Page 28 of Blueprints, Battlelines and Ballrooms (Tales from Honeysuckle Street #4)

Chapter Seventeen

She should not have done that.

Mercy, heavens, and hope, she should not have done that.

All day her body had hungered for Johannes, craving his touch, his energy, and his strength. And how he’d looked at her. Like sin and flame. A look that had been everything.

First step. Left. Right.

Next step. Left. Right.

Florence clung to the handrail. He’d asked her first, too, like he thought about that night as often as she did.

Her back creaked, and she rested against the wall.

Braced herself for the next step. Nothing had hurt as he’d spread her knees.

Nothing had hurt as he’d stroked her, rolled her, and even now, parts of her felt sated while others cried out and reminded her that she was not whole, she was not young, and she could not allow herself to be bent over a table and taken.

No matter how good it had felt while it was happening.

Left… left…

The nibbling ache that sat in her lower back as a persistent white noise grumbled, growled, then roared. It erupted with a clawing agony that clamoured and climbed around her spine, along her bones, through her fingers, everywhere .

She was not whole. She could not do such things.

The pain raged and consumed her until everything fell away.

The walls, the carpet, the stairs, the handrail, they all slipped like water.

And she surrendered, fell through nothing into the arcing emptiness of the world at her back.

The pain owned her. Owned everything. Through its blackness, Johannes shouted her name, and his voice jumbled with her mother’s, even her father’s.

All of them calling, but she could not answer.

She fell. Fell past her feet. Fell forever.

What was her pain shattered as she collided with the edge of the stairs and the floor, each solid surface a blunt wallop that beat against her, and then everything was agony and she could not breathe or make her heart pump or her eyes focus or do anything because everything, everything screamed.

Gentle arms. Worried shouts. Her broken body, gathered. Ascending. Cotton, pillows, comfort, warmth, and finally, finally, laudanum in water and the promise of relief.